MLB owners delay sale of Padres to Moorad

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PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. (AP) — Major league owners have put off approval of sale of the San Diego Padres to Jeff Moorad.

Commissioner
Bud Selig said Thursday that baseball's ownership committee and
executive council unanimously decided to defer action "to get more
clarity and technical information."

Moorad, who could be seen
talking with Selig on a balcony outside the owners meeting Thursday,
said he and the commissioner tried to work out an "11th-hour" agreement
to get the matter presented to the full session of the 30 owners but
were unable to do so.

"We'll support the process and are proud to
be part of the process and look forward to addressing some technical
questions and moving along," Moorad said..

Moorad was a prominent
sports agent before becoming a minority owner first with the Arizona
Diamondbacks, then with the Padres. His group owns 49 percent of the
Padres and is set to buy the remainder from majority owner John Moores.

Selig
pulled the sale from Thursday's agenda, a move that upset Moores so
much that he was the only one of the 30 owners to vote against Selig's
two-year contract extension, according to a person in the room who asked
not to be identified because the details were supposed to remain
confidential.

Selig said he wants the questions involved in the sale to be resolved "expeditiously."

"There's
no hidden agenda here. There's nothing else," he said. "There were a
lot of economic concerns. The most important thing that we do is
bringing in new owners, so we have really become very, very fastidious
about the economics of who can make it. And I'm not suggesting there
were any negatives. There were just questions that we didn't have time
to answer here."

Selig said Jonathan Mariner, MLB's executive vice
president for finance, "frankly had been raising questions to me since
last Friday" about the sale. Those questions intensified during meetings
of the ownership committee and executive council.

"Both groups
really did their homework," Selig said. 'They were ardent supporters of
Jeff and everything else, but there were questions they kept saying,
'Well, we need answer to that,' so I've already instructed our guys to
meet with them and begin to develop answers, and they'll come back to
us."

Moorad said he was not surprised that nothing was resolved on Thursday.

"We
got the word that they had some technical questions," he said. "We
tried to resolve them this morning. It just wasn't possible to work that
quickly, and that's it. I'm happy to defer and have it taken up at a
more appropriate time."

Selig said it wouldn't be necessary to
wait until the owners' next scheduled meeting in New York in May to
approve the sale, that it could be done by conference call.

Moorad
also said that the franchise wouldn't necessarily have to have the sale
complete in order to sign a crucial television deal with Fox before the
season begins.

Selig said the fact that Moorad was once an agent,
on the other side of the bargaining table with owners, had nothing to
do with delaying the sale.

"This was about economics," he said. "This was not about personalities."

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